


Metamorphosis

by Vrankavrana



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Essos, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Jon Snow is Not Called Aegon, R Plus L Equals J, rhaegar was an utter dingus and you cannot change my mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 10:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19885948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vrankavrana/pseuds/Vrankavrana
Summary: Robert's Rebellion may have passed into legend but legends are rarely kind to those who live through them.Years later and half a world away, the remains of Arthur Dayne and Lyanna Stark reflect on what brought them there.





	Metamorphosis

**Author's Note:**

> Some little notes,  
> this story takes place at some point in that nebulous "Arthur and Lyanna run away to Essos to raise Jon AU" that seems to collectively exist amongst everyone who ships this ship.  
> There's also discussion of a relationship between an underage girl and an adult man though nothing explicit is described so please keep that in mind if it makes you uncomfortable.

“Did you love him?”

It slips into the quiet air long after they have exhausted themselves; Arthur does not know what brought it on. Perhaps mere curiosity, or maybe with Lyanna in his arms and Jon sleeping in the room down the hall, and all the things that he has stolen from Rhaegar settled so neatly around him, Arthur feels the ghost of his prince hovering over him closer than ever.

He regrets having spoken when he feels Lyanna stiffen where she had been lying on his chest. Slowly, slowly, she relaxes again and the silence descends upon them once more but without the comfort it had held a moment before. As he stares at the ceiling Arthur thinks he feels the night bend and stretch; in the dark, time itself seems to warp and the shadows on the walls paint towers and armies where he knows there are none. He isn’t expecting her to speak and is surprised when she does,

“I don’t know,” She says, so quietly he almost doesn’t hear her.

“How can you not know?” It comes out more accusatory than he intends and Arthur feels Lyanna begin to move away. He is suddenly gripped by the irrational certainty that he must absolutely know her answer, even if he hates it, and that if he lets her go they will never speak of it again. He tightens his grip around her shoulder,

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, tell me - please,” he holds his breath as she settles back against him.

“I thought I loved him, I think,” she says eventually and Arthur breathes out through his nose, disturbing the flyaway hairs on her forehead.

“I don’t understand”

“I was fifteen, could _you_ have claimed to know you loved someone when you were fifteen?”

He doesn’t respond immediately, letting the question sit in his mind and considers it as he would an opponent on the field. Arthur has often found conversations akin to swordsmanship, though the cuts and thrusts of the former have never come to him as easily as their steel counterparts. He knows he takes too long to think sometimes but with Lyanna it is a weakness he has learned he can afford. She does not begrudge him his moments of silence.

“I can’t say; I was very wrapped up in my training at the time.” It is not the sort of answer she wants but it is the only one he can honestly give.

“I was betrothed to Robert Baratheon”

Arthur does not remember very much of Robert Baratheon, he had been vaguely aware of him at Harrenhal though the only lasting impression he’d made of the man had been of a great laughing mouth beneath a mane of wild black hair.

“Everyone told me I should be grateful, that he was young, that he was handsome, an heir to a great house who would take _such_ good care of me when he locked me up in his castle to push out his children” Arthur has never heard Lyanna sound like this, her voice bitter with twisted harmonies and disquieting echoes. She clenches their sheets in a fist,

“They even told me he loved me, that he was a good man, that he would give up his whores and his drink when we married. Even Ned said so”

He has known her long enough now to know that Eddard Stark had been the favorite of her brothers and to know from the twist in her voice that she was deeply stung by this betrayal of judgment.

“I knew better. You can put a man in new circumstances but nothing will change him unless he wishes to change, and even at fifteen I could see Robert would never have changed” 

“What happened?”

She is quiet for a long moment, her eyes far away,

“I met Rhaegar. He played a song on the night you arrived at Harrenhal, do you remember? It was so beautiful I cried. A song had never made me do that before. I met him once after, to tell him so, and then he said something back and before I knew it we were talking as if we had known each other all our lives”

Arthur nods against her head. He doesn’t particularly remember the song, by that point in his life he had heard rather many of Rhaegar’s songs and after a while they’d all started to sound the same. But he is not surprised at its effect; Rhaegar’s music had always had the uncanny ability to move people to shocking depths of emotion. The charisma too, he remembers the prince had been a private creature but when he could be moved to give his attention he gave it fully. He can’t blame her for having opened up so quickly; it was a heady feeling after all, to have the heir to the seven kingdoms looking at you as if you were speaking of the most important things in the world. 

“I told him all about Robert, and father, and Ned, about how I wanted to fight and have adventures, how afraid I was that my whole life was going to be spent locked up somewhere with no choices and nowhere to go. The wife of someone who saw me more as a prize than a person” She sighs suddenly and lets go of the sheets bringing her hands up to gesture emphatically,

“I was so stupid, looking back on it now”

“You were fifteen”

“I was fifteen”

“Was that it?”

“No, there was more” and shockingly, she smiles,

“Do you remember the Knight of the Laughing Tree?”

Arthur groans,

“Of course, the king had us searching the woods for hours and near burned us alive when we came back empty handed, kingsguard or no, I always wondered how he got away from us”

Lyanna’s grin widens to show teeth,

“I didn’t get away, Rhaegar found me trying to hide my armor”

Arthur stares,

“ _No_ ”

Lyanna is a wolf laughing at him in his own bed,

“You _didn’t_ ”

“I did!”

The kingsguard, all the best knights in the seven kingdoms and they had been outwitted by a fifteen year old girl. And for what! The knight had asked for nothing but for his opponents to take a firmer hand with their squires. To his own surprise Arthur finds himself dissolving into giggles,

“Of course you did, we spent so long looking and the whole time you were right under our noses!”

“Everyone was very worried you know, Robert even told me to stay in my tent in case the knight came back and tried something” 

“Seven forbid!”

They are both laughing now, curled up like children. Arthur has covered his face with his hands and Lyanna is almost insufferably smug.

“Sshhh, we’ll wake Jon” he tries to quiet down but Lyanna keeps snickering so he tries to cover her mouth with his hands. She nips at his fingers and he quickly draws them away.

“Lyanna!”

“Yes Arthur?” Her face is the picture of innocence and he is sorely tempted to kick her off the bed but then they would certainly wake Jon and they still have a conversation to finish so instead he pulls her back to him with a grunt. 

“You said Rhaegar found you?”

Lyanna sighs as the oppressive weight of the conversation reasserts itself,

“He did. I was so scared, I’d gotten Benjen to help me and I thought Rhaegar would drag us right to the king”

“But he didn’t”

“No. Well, first he said he should because it was his duty to his father but then he said that he remembered what I had told him, about wanting to fight, and that he couldn’t bear to have me punished for following my nature” she makes a mocking sound, “He helped us hide the armor and snuck us back into the camp, I thought that was the end of it really, I didn’t see him in person again until the joust”

Like an ominous clap of a thunder, the joust, the joust, _the joust_ , it had all come down to the joust hadn’t it. Arthur may have been the king’s man, the prince’s man, but on that day he had still been enough of a dornishman to burn at the insult that had been paid.

Some of the old anger must show on his face because Lyanna frowns at him,

“I didn’t want it-” she takes a breath to collect herself, “- he never told me what he was going to do, when he won the joust I was so happy because I thought he was my friend but then he came right up to me with the crown and this expectant look on his face and I couldn’t say no!” she swallows the ghost of an old panic, “he was the prince and everyone was staring and the king was staring and I - I couldn’t say no” a pause, a deeper breath, “but, do you know what I always remembered after?”

Arthur shakes his head,

“Princess Elia. She was wearing this lovely dress; it was orange and gold, like she had been draped in sunset. She looked more a queen than anyone I had ever seen. Everyone was looking at me but the whole time Rhaegar was giving me the crown she didn’t take her eyes off him. It was silly but later I thought that maybe she’d known that I hadn’t wanted it, that she hadn’t blamed me.”

There is a beat of silence; Arthur is somewhat embarrassed to realize he can’t recall what Elia had been doing, his own gaze had never wavered from Lyanna and the crown of blue roses the prince had so foolishly bestowed.

“We left after that. Robert was furious, I don’t remember what Ned said to him that stopped him challenging Rhaegar then and there but it was a small miracle he did and I think Father wanted to avoid any more _incidents_ ”

“I can imagine”

She smacks his arm,

“After that I thought it was the end, it had been mortifying but now it was done and I could go back home and leave it all behind. I’d had my little adventure and though I still hated where my life was going I thought maybe I’d accept it if it meant no one would ever look at me again the way the crowd had that day.” She snorts “Not that _that_ lasted. By the time we got home I was ready to leave all over again”

Arthur frowns, thoughtful,

“But you didn’t right? Not right away, Rhaegar took you south the next year, even counting the time it took you to get back north there would have been months in-between”

“No, you’re right. I was back in Winterfell for almost four months and you must believe me when I say they were some of the worst months of my life. I’d thought it bad before but apparently me father had settled on the idea that _I_ had somehow tempted the prince into embarrassing us both, and brought women from all corners of the north to try and break me from every habit that made me myself. Every day was a new argument, I went to bed without dinner more often than I did, my father wouldn’t talk to me, Ned was back in The Vale, and Brandon and Benjen just didn’t understand”

“You must have told him you hadn’t done anything to tempt Rhaegar.”

“I did. But I’m told I was very beautiful at the time which for many may as well have been the same thing”

It is not a foreign idea to Arthur who has often seen men claim to fall for women from their looks alone, even if he has never found in himself the same instinct to leer and jape the way that seems to come so naturally to so many others. Though, if he is being honest, until this, whatever _this_ is that he has with Lyanna, he cannot say that any woman had ever really caught his eye in the first place. 

In his time before the kingsguard his fellow knights had often teased him for it, proclaiming that he looked at no women because he was either too strict with his standards or too busy fucking his squire. They’d laughed and though Arthur had always found the blatant shows of lust in poor taste he’d never thought them particularly harmful either.

That Lyanna should have known such attention all her life leaves him for the first time uncertain, uncomfortable. He curls his arm tighter around her to dispel the unpleasant feeling.

He’d heard tales of her beauty, that she’d caught the heart of her betrothed from description alone. That she was wonderfully pale, and willow thin, that her hair was thick, dark, and soft as the furs with which the Starks adorned themselves. The stories had painted her in beautiful gowns, elegant and austere as the kingdom from which she hailed.

The first time he’d seen her in person he’d found her coltish, wild, and not quite grown into the length of her limbs. He’d wondered what about her had so enraptured the prince and Robert Baratheon before him, wondered if there was simply some quality about her that he was not seeing.

He can look at her differently now, though it is difficult to glimpse even the shadow of the girl she’d once been. Her pregnancy had left her haggard and half dead, with stripes and other marks on her body still visible even now. Their trek across the desert and the days she now spends in the warm Bravosi sun have also left their mark; her skin tanned brown and freckled. Not so thin either, Lyanna has grown into her body with remarkable ease, her shoulders wide and arms strong. This clever, passionate, woman who wears bright Bravosi colours and fears nothing and no one. Of all the stories he’d heard of the Lady Lyanna none had mentioned that she was funny, or brave, that her laughter was a howl or that she was as stubborn as anyone Arthur had ever met.

He absentmindedly drags his fingers on her arm, drawing nonsense shapes as he thinks. He’s missing something. When they’d come across the Stark party heading south in the first place he’d had his suspicions, when Lyanna had appeared in their camp later that night they had doubled. She had known they were coming, he’d been sure of it, but any such thoughts had been buried in the confusion that had followed. When Rhaegar had given her a horse and the lot of them had sped away into the night like common thieves. 

“How did you know we were coming to get you?” he asks, finally giving voice to the old thought,

“Letters. The prince sent me one shortly after I got home explaining how he’d never wanted to embarrass me and that he’d only ever meant to show his admiration for my bravery in the joust. It seemed a little odd even then but I was without a single friend and he said he was willing to listen, even told me I was right and that what my father was doing wasn’t fair” 

“It wasn’t”

“No, I suppose not, but it doesn’t matter much now. We started trading letters in secret. Our maester back then was an old man so I would go check the ravens for him every morning. He never realized when I gave him one less letter than had arrived. Then, one day the prince said he’d heard enough and didn’t want to leave me to suffer any longer. He said he’d come get me and take me south where I could explore and go wherever I wished with his blessing and never have to marry unless I wished it.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I wanted to. And it was so fun to plan out all the details, where we would meet and where I would go. Now though … sometimes I wonder if he ever meant to let me go at all”

Arthur doesn’t think so. Rhaegar had gone strange after Harrenhal, locking himself in his chambers for hours at a time, taking longer and longer trips to Summerhall, sometimes with Arthur or another of the kingsguard but sometimes entirely alone. He had become consumed in his thoughts, his prophecies, desperate to act though on what he’d never made explicitly clear. Whatever fueled his anxieties seemed always to be pulsing under his skin.

“I was so delighted when it all worked exactly as we’d planned. It was fun, at first, the way we’d ride and sleep in tents, Rhaegar would join me and we’d talk until the early morning as if we’d always been the best of friends”

This Arthur remembers, in large part because he had usually been the one sitting watch and so had been pointedly aware of how much time Rhaegar was spending with Lyanna. How over the course of their trip the prince had slowly eroded the distance between them, the way Lyanna would lean on his arm and ride alongside him more like a betrothed than anything resembling friendship.

“And so you married” He knows it comes out snide because Lyanna gives him a long searching look against which he keeps his face blank by skill long perfected in the halls of the mad king,

“One night, while we were talking I realized something was different, Rhaegar was not acting like himself at all. When I asked him what was wrong he just kissed me and said he’d been in love with me since Harrenhal, that our letters had only further convinced him I was the best of women and that he wanted nothing but to travel with me and have me as his wife”

Arthur blinks, “Did you believe him?”

“That he loved me? I was very fond of him then, and he’d done so much for me, I think I thought that was what love was, that you’d do anything for the other person. So he told me he loved me and I felt it was really the least I could do, to love him too. I don’t know if he meant it, if that’s what you were asking, I used to think he did but maybe he was trying to convince himself it was true as much as he was me”

“Why?”

“Because it made it easier for him, to do the things he did” 

“So you married him because you felt you owed him?”

“No. I married him because I thought I loved him”

“What about Elia? Surely you couldn’t have forgotten that the prince already had a wife? A family?”

At this she looks uncomfortable, sheepish,

“That was one of my objections, before I agreed I said that no matter how much I loved him or he me I would not marry him if it would bring harm to the princess and her children”

“So why then? -”

“He told me he’d had their marriage annulled” 

Arthur is stunned; he lets her go and pushes himself up onto an elbow to stare down at her.

“And you believed him? On what grounds! Their match had been witnessed by half of Kings Landing! They had done their duty; he had an heir _and_ a daughter, did you really believe he would consign his children to bastardy on the off chance you would be able to provide him the same?!”

She stares up at him, furious suddenly,

“Oh! And how was I supposed to know!-” she is up now too, her eyes burning “- tell me _Ser Dayne_ , on what grounds was I, a follower of the Old Gods supposed to challenge the _Prince of the Seven Kingdoms_ when he told me how annulment worked under your Seven? Was I to find a septon? A septa? Ask one of _you_?”

They are both flushed with anger and Arthur drops his head with a huff.

“He lied”

“I know that _now_ ” She says, and sags down as well. “It was then that Father and Brandon went south, it was – it was around then that things changed”

Arthur remembers this as well. Rhaegar had expected any Stark party after Lyanna to chase after them, not go directly to the king. He hadn’t accounted for Brandon Stark and in doing so had made an unforgivable mistake. So long as the Starks had lived there had been a chance for resolution, with the north at least if not the Stormlands. Following the death of Stark and his heir, there had been no chance for peace. Rhaegar had read that letter with an ashen face and spoken to no one for days, instead announcing they were going to Dorne and leaving it to Arthur and his fellow knights to explain to Lyanna why their travel plans had changed.

She too had gone ashen at the news, howled and screamed, demanding Rhaegar speak to her. He hadn’t. He’d already turned his horse back to Kings Landing earlier that afternoon. By the next day she had gone still and silent, had asked them very politely to please take her home to her family, and wept when they’d told her they could not.

“It was like my dream had become a nightmare, I’d only wanted to be free but instead I was being taken further and further away from home, my family was dead, and it was my fault because if I’d never run away then they would never have had to go south looking for me”

This is an old hurt; one that Arthur knows has never quite healed but had been cauterized by necessity over the course of their mad trek across the Dornish desert.

“I started to hate him then.”

Her eyes are coals set below her thick northern brows. Her gaze terrible as she stares into the middle distance somewhere over his shoulder. 

“I think we all did ... a little bit.” he admits, and her gaze turns to him in surprise,

“Well, perhaps not hate … but I served Rhaegar since I was a young man, he was my best friend but even I began to doubt him in the end. When he left us at the tower and went off to face Robert Baratheon alone. I cannot even begin to imagine what Oswell or any of the others must have been thinking”

Lyanna shrugs,

"I hated you too, all of you. I was convinced that if I could only leave I’d find everything as it had been before I’d left. My family hearty and hale, in my mind it was only you keeping me from them. I knew I’d never forgive you” 

“I – I should have realized what was happening sooner, If I could have done something I would have. I am sorry.”

“Do you think Rhaegar was? At the end?”

Arthur takes a moment to think,

“I like to think so. Whatever else he was I like to think he was still a good man. Rhaegar, as I knew him at least, would have regretted it.”

“The war? Or what he did to me?”

Arthur has no answer to that, cannot answer without feeling like a liar so he doesn’t. Reaching out he pulls her to him and hopes the words of comfort he wants to say but can’t find come across in the gesture,

Lyanna smiles against his shoulder,

“Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. Though If it means anything to you he was never much good at it anyway. You’re doing _much_ better.”

She pats his chest fondly.

Arthur sputters and Lyanna giggles until he is fighting laughter as well, relief lighting the air as Rhaegar’s presence fades from the room.

They settle back into silence, the weight of history settling like a mantle around them. Arthur thinks of Rhaegar and finds to his surprise that he can still picture him exactly as he was when he’d last seen him. The haunted quality to his gaze, the desperation in his voice when he’d told Arthur in no uncertain terms that he was to stay at the tower and guard Lyanna and his unborn child. How he’d disappeared over the dunes the next morning like a fading dream, hair shining silver.

The strange quality of that day had remained, as if the whole world had been holding its breath only to release it in a great gust when Arthur and Lyanna had themselves fled the tower. The dreamlike quality of the air had shattered and been replaced by the mad rush that was unique to survival. Everything that had come before the desert had turned hazy, slipping between them like grains of sand that had slowly ground away their edges until whoever they’d been had eroded and only Arthur and Lyanna remained.

Those people had somehow survived, dragged themselves kicking and screaming to the Dornish coast, keeping little Jon alive by shear force of luck and a stubborn refusal to accept any other outcome.

Now those people lie here, whoever they are, hardly knightly or noble but somehow, somehow content.

**Author's Note:**

> As one may be able to guess, Rhaegar is not my favourite Targaryen.  
> I do think he cared about Lyanna after a fashion but it doesn't change the fact that he started putting the moves on her when she was underage even by Westeros' standards. Needless to say the way the show in particular portrayed their romance was not appealing to me and this idea had been festering in one form or another ever since.  
> This is the rather self indulgent result.   
> Any and all comments welcome.


End file.
